As blockbusters employ ever greater numbers of dazzling visual effects and digital illusions, this book explores the material roots and stylistic practices of special effects and their makers.

Gathering leading voices in cinema and new media studies, this comprehensive anthology moves beyond questions of spectacle
to examine special effects from the earliest years of cinema, via experimental film and the Golden Age of Hollywood, to our
contemporary transmedia landscape. In Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts you can read about prosthetic makeup effects, slime, blood effects, mirrors, stop motion and more!

Wide-ranging and accessible, the book illuminates and interrogates the vast array of techniques film has used throughout its history to conjure spectacular images, mediate bodies, map worlds and make meanings. With examples from Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Ghostbusters and Gremlins.

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